Posted
by
Soulskill
on Monday December 06, 2010 @09:08PM
from the zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz dept.

An anonymous reader sends this quote from Wired:
"A novel anti-piracy measure baked into the Nintendo DS version of Michael Jackson: The Experience makes copied versions of the game unplayable and taunts gamers with the blaring sound of vuvuzelas. Many games have installed switches that detect pirated copies and act accordingly, like ending the user's game after 20 minutes. Ubisoft has come under fire multiple times for what players have seen as highly restrictive anti-piracy measures that annoy legitimate users as much or more so than pirates. But some more-mischievous developers have used tricks similar to the vuvuzela fanfare to mess with pirates. Batman: Arkham Asylum lets unauthorized users play through the game as if it were a normal copy, with a single exception: Batman's cape-glide ability doesn't work, rendering the game impossible to finish — although you might bash your head against it trying to make what are now impossible jumps. If you pirate Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, brace yourself for an explosion, as your entire base will detonate within 30 seconds of loading the game."

I would think that with such a game, the copy protection used would be that every time it's loaded, part of the game would disappear. Kind of like what happened to Michael's face every time he had plastic surgery. But then again, that may not be actual copy protection -- it seems to me that it would enhance the "Michael Jackson experience",. ..

More like you've been struck by...a total idiot. While this particular "trick" is obvious to anyone NOT what the real game is supposed to be like, one of the things that helped to kill the developers of Titan's Quest on the PC was their frankly insane copy protection. It would make a "pirated" game glitch, skip, and be all around unplayable for any length of time, but of course word quickly got out that "The game is a buggy POS" and people avoided it like the clap. It didn't help that the developers were so damned paranoid that ANYONE that complained of a bug was automatically labeled a pirate by them.

It is a damned shame I didn't somehow save the chatboard because me and one of the developers got into a nasty argument over that, with me going so far as to show him a pic of the game box sitting on top of my local paper with the date visible and he STILL accused me of being a pirate, saying I must have photoshopped the thing in the under 15 minutes it took me to take the pic and upload. Needless to say the next pic I uploaded was one of me chunking the POS game in the garbage, along with a promise to slam the game wherever it was being sold online (which I did).

So they really have to be careful with the anti-piracy crap, and they ought to give us something in return for putting up with their shit. Personally I think there ought to be a rule that after 2 years or the developer stops pushing patches, whichever comes first, a DRM removal patch should HAVE TO be released. That way those of us that buy our game fair and square don't end up having to hunt for cracks because their &^$%&^%$&$ DRM doesn't work on modern systems, or even worse have our new machine shit itself and die because their ring 0 crap is designed for x86 and we've moved on to X64.

A FINAL WORD OF WARNING...ALWAYS be sure to back up your machine BEFORE installing any older game on X64!!! Because I have found out the hard way that there are certain version of Starforce, safedisc, and SecuROM that will happily install on X64 but WILL NOT UNINSTALL, even with their supposed removal tools, and will cause all kinds of hell on your system! We are talking inability to hibernate or shutdown properly, random glitches, screwed up burns on your drives, it is a mess and the ONLY way I've found to fix it is to either boot into a second OS and remove the files, followed by a safe mode reg cleaning, or a full wipe and reinstall. Frankly I don't see why those damned Ring 0 DRM creators can't be busted just like malware writers, because they sure as hell can cause just as big a mess. Oh and be careful if you have both Starforce and either Safedisc or SecuROM, because certain versions will NOT play nice with each other and cause system instability! It is sad that it has gotten to the point that I just get a pirate version of my older games rather than using the discs, simply because the pirate version is less likely to mess up my X64 install.

Michael Jackson's Moonwalker is one of my favorite old-school games. Dancing your enemies to death and transforming into a robot to save captured children from overtly sexual enemies. It's such a ridiculous game that it can be a lot of hilarious fun to play with friends.

So you're a recording and performing artist who's trying to keep us all alive? Ever heard of the term "unwarranted self-importance"? And what big decision was this? Sorry, but I'm not finding anything recent that signs us into slavery for Monsanto, which admittedly is indeed made up of shitburgers.

Whatever medication you are on, adjust the dose. More, less, just pick a direction and try it for a while.

In between your struggles to "keep you and your future generations alive", I would try to get some bed rest. Oh, and yes, we know that Monsanto is a bunch of asshat tried to take over the food world by patenting everything and sue farmers who put back seeds, but in between anxiety attacks, we like to read about video games.

I'm pondering whether or not to use my other account mod points to mod you funny, or just sit right here and bitch you out for being such an ignorant piece of shit musically

Look, Michael Jackson did some decently catchy songs... but seriously, you've got to be deluded to claim he did anything revolutionary. I was but a kid when Thriller came out, and I already saw it was cliched and populist. Seriously, listen to a bit of Banarama... you

Because it takes longer for the crackers to figure out if they're "done" or not. There have been things like purposeful crash bugs that lead to multiple releases and such of cracked titles. Anything that keeps an uncracked version out of pirates hands theoretically extends sales, as the sales aren't competing with a free version.

1: the code may get triggered by accident leading to a legitimate user getting frustrated at the games apparent buginess/uncompletability.2: pirates may not realise that the problems they are experiencing are a result of antipiracy meausres.

Either way you have users who think the game is buggy as hell telling their friends to avoid it.

pirates may not realise that the problems they are experiencing are a result of antipiracy meausres.

They might as well. If a game dumped me to the desktop with no error message within the first 30 seconds, I automatically assumed the copy protection on my legally purchased game failed. First thing to do was get a NoCD crack and retry. Almost every time, that fixed the problem right away.

If I get an error message, then I assume it's a hardware compatibility bug or some other kind of glitch.

Because the point of the crazy schemes is that they CAN'T tell, at least not until the copy the pirate THOUGHT was fully cracked has been widely disseminated. Users who download it will be fed up with the glitches and buy the full game to fix them, in theory.

It's (slightly) harder to detect by crackers when there are multiple checks, one of them hidden deep inside the game play. The idea behind it is that the publisher bets on the crackers not playing the game long enough to notice the second copy protection.

About 15 years ago a friend of mine had a game called "Settlers 2". Pretty standard RTS in a medieval/fantasy setting IIRC, quite cute.

The CD it came on had visible pattern burned into it that would screw up reading the disc very easily. Using various blind copiers I managed to get a decent iso image off it. Of course the burn patterns weren't just to stop you reading it....

If the game code did not detect the burn patterns in the CD it was running from it was very clever. Tricksy.

In the game you had an economy based on a few things, one of which was iron. Another was pork. You needed farms to get pigs, and an abattoir to turn that into ham. The ham was then used as food for the settlers. Specifically the miners. They ate ham then went mining for iron ore, and the foundry turned out iron which you could then turn into weapons and other soldier equipment.

After about half an hour of playing I tried to figure out why I had no army. After a lot of squinting it turned out that the iron was coming out of the mines and being carried to the foundry, which was producing.... pigs.

I just had to laugh and mentally congratulate the developers for that.

Leaving aside the inevitable flamewar about piracy and sales and that endlessly retrodden path of discussion, to interject some technical details: to a cracker they're usually called a 'trap', 'flag' or, if you will, a 'logic bomb'.

Some of them might be obvious, but of course if they're obvious they'll be found right away. The idea is that by making the traps subtle or to require you to actually play the game to some extent (and essentially playtest it) to uncover them, they'll be harder to track down becau

Ideally people would pay for the software they liked. Ideally the filesharing of copyrighted material would only be used as evaluation, followed by deleting the software (after an evaluation period of a week or so) or paying for it. Ideally the distribution of disks would be stupid, because it's cheaper to set a filesharing server to send it over the interwebs. The companies have reacted wrong, but the pirates incited the reaction.

AutoCAD had a "bug" where the lines in drawings would become fainter and fainter with every save - *only* in cracked versions. Obviously the trick is to have a big obvious "NOP me out!" block of code that clearly deals with copy protection - and something sneaky tucked away out of sight.

Google is failing me, and it was a while ago that I heard this one, but I kinda hope it's true; the story goes that a cable company, tired of hackers getting free service, started pushing out weekly updates that disabled the hackers' workarounds. This went on for some time, the hackers having to use increasingly convoluted measures to get around the latest updates, but always succeeding relatively quickly. After a while the boxes stop working altogether, and the company points out that they fully expected each week's update to be circumvented, but that they were designed in such a way that the cumulative workarounds disabled the box altogether.

It certainly has a bit of an urban legend sound to it now that I come to retell it, though...

3d Studio 4 (not max!) from thee same company would randomly corrupt your meshes in most cracked versions, but only if you had more than 500 vertices. So it would pass initial cracker tests, but fail for actual use by 3d artists. It was quite clever.

I did something like this may years ago in a specialized PCB CAD program. In addition to the normal security check the program would apply a small scaling factor to the file when exported for board design. Everything appeared to work correctly, but anyone who tried to fab a board with a pirated copy would learn an expensive lesson.

I don't think such subtlety is very clever when used for copy protection. What exactly are they trying to achieve? They are getting a kind of revenge against people pirating their game, but it doesn't give them any more customers. When copy protection is obvious and remains uncracked for months that may encourage people to buy a game, but if the protection is subtle it will just make the pirates dislike the game and think the developers are incompetent. They won't be thinking, "Well, maybe I should have bou

That kind of measure seems clever, but if unpublicized and subtle, it will make the program appear buggy. They need to make it very clear you've got a playable demo on your hands, rather than a buggy full version. Playable demos sell games. Buggy full versions put people off.

"Batman: Arkham Asylum lets unauthorized users play through the game as if it were a normal copy, with a single exception: Batman's cape-glide ability doesn't work, rendering the game impossible to finish — although you might bash your head against it trying to make what are now impossible jumps. If you pirate Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, brace yourself for an explosion, as your entire base will detonate within 30 seconds of loading the game..."

So how is this different then the purchased, bug-ridden, unfinished versions that are pawned off on us with every release?

And it doesn't need to be. Of course, they can't prosecute anyone who "pirates" the freely disseminated version, but then.. maybe they don't want to prosecute people who obviously like their product and therefore might become customers with a small nudge, and if they displace real pirated copies, then they cut down on piracy either way, although the recipients might still think their copies are, in fact, pirated.

The same way they always have for the last 30 years. Bury some code that's supposed to toggle some hardware effect in the cartridge or media, check for the side effect, then crap out if it fails.

Another way is just using attributes of the cartridges against pirates. Copies are often made on read-write media, but legitimate cartridges are read-only. So you have legitimate executable code that says "DO_MUSIC: call PLAY_MUSIC", and you add a statement that says "write to address DO_MUSIC 'call PLAY_VUVUZELA'". A legitimate cartridge can't overwrite the ROM, so it fails, and the call to PLAY_MUSIC remains in place. But on a rewritable cartridge it does overwrite it and zzzzzzzzzzzzzz happens.

The flash carts do allow writing to the SD card from the DS. There's homebrew that does it. That probably doesn't hold up for whatever memory space they're using to load the ROMs from though. In any case, this will be worked around with a ROM patch in no time.

Copy protection is generally a module that's linked into the system, gets called at start up, does some validation / checksumming / decryption etc. Crackers tend to attack the validation so that it returns 'all good' even when its not. Or they wait until the relevant bits are decrypted and then copy those in and bypass the validation/decryption entirely.... its more complicated than that, but that's sort of the gist of it.

Crackers attack the copy protection, and then once its defeated release the cracks/cracked copies.

This piracy detection is essentially a separate redundant anti-piracy module, with the same sort of detection/validation stuff as the primary one. However it doesn't get activated at start up. It gets activated later, sometimes much later,and instead of throwing up a "not a valid copy" it instead modifies the game rules or parameters slightly.

The idea is that the crackers won't find it. They are attacking the primary copy protection which inevitibaly falls... but often they are only interested in cracking the game, and being the releaser; they often aren't actually all that interested in playing the game itself. So once the protection appears defeated and they appear to be able to play the game they release.

However the 2ndary copy protection is still intact, and messes with players who actually try to complete the game.

Its not really any harder to defeat than the primary copy protection; if anything its usually easier. But since it gets missed its gets to mess with pirate copy players for a few months while it gets identified, defeated, and then new cracks are released. Meanwhile there are now bunches of people running the old cracks who might never figure it out... especially if the impact is subtle.

The main problem with these copy protections is that like any copy protection, some times it doesn't work and legitmate customers are affected. This can be particularly troubling if the impact is subtle... so they come to think the game is just defective (which I guess it is).

And then next time, the crackers are a bit slower out the gate on the release. Possibly by long enough to beat the game and so forth.

Of course once the crackers get good at figuring out and bypassing this security, then developers will start using similar secondary DRM that doesn't activate until a couple days past the official release date.

One very old scheme is to embed a checksum of the code segment inside the binary itself and then check it at runtime. It's not foolproof but it will identify most pirated copies with zero chance of false positives.

One very old scheme is to embed a checksum of the code segment inside the binary itself and then check it at runtime. It's not foolproof but it will identify most pirated copies with zero chance of false positives.

That would prevent modification, but how does that prevent it from being duplicated?

Most pirated software of this nature has been modified to bypass serial number checks, etc. If you can detect any modification to the program, then they cannot do this bypassing without also finding the check-summing code and fixing it also.

Yes, once you've figured out how the checksum is generated. But once you have figured out where/how the checksum is generated you could also modify that code to always return "checksum validates" or somesuch...

I never have problems with my games. Just give it about 6 months or so and the copy you get will be bug free, patched and playable. Of course it will be free too boot, as the pirates are the ones who make most games playable. I figure if a company wants me to pay for their game, they will make it worth me paying for it. As long as their games are crappy, full of fail and AIDS and generally released and forgotten, fuck them. I will download a cracked, patched and working pirated version and play it.

Happened to me a few times as well. Genuine retail copy on my shelf, real disc in a real CD drive - base explodes. I got bitten by Operation Flashpoint's over-zealous FADE DRM as well.

Legit copies crapping out? that is really lame; luckily I've never had that problem.

"If you pirate Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, brace yourself for an explosion, as your entire base will detonate within 30 seconds of loading the game"I know for a fact that this statement is false.I have this friend who had a pirated copy. I....oops, I mean "he"....played it all the time back in the day, and never once had his base explode on him.It worked fine, other than the music and videos were all missing.

Your friend was just using a good crack that was circumventing this particular copy protection. I remember that back in the times, we used cracks for Red Alert 2 and C&C at LAN parties - that's quite a shame for such good games, but you couldn't really expect everybody to have genuine copies of the games, even if they came with 2 CDs.
Well, the bottom line is that with many cracks, the exploding base phenomenon was real.

If the game can detect that it was pirated, the circumvention isn't good enough. These little pranks will fool the 0-day groups, but within hours a "proper" fix will come along, and these childish stunts will have been in vain.

The thing to remember about warez crackers, is they tend to be more skilled than the people who release the games. Trying to outsmart them is a fallacy.

The point of DRM, from the publisher's perspective, isn't to prevent piracy - it's to delay it. Most of the sales will happen within the first week, due to the advertising focus - look at all the huge launches like Halo or Call of Duty, that sell millions in a day. If a game can stay uncracked for a month, the DRM is considered to have done its job exceptionally. If you can make DRM that takes a full day to test, and which would take several attempts to circumvent fully, you can easily delay the piracy of the game long enough that potential pirates instead go out and buy the game.

Because, from the publisher's perspective, that's giving away money. While they will put up with piracy losses after a month or so, they still want to earn money from later sales. Several games continue to be good sellers well after launch - DooM is still making id some money, 20 years later, Psychonauts didn't break even until years after release, and Call of Duty 4 continues to be a high-seller. Remember, these companies don't see the public domain as "something to contribute to" - if anything, they see i

Apologies in advance for being a little confrontational about this topic...

The thing to remember about warez crackers, is they tend to be more skilled than the people who release the games. Trying to outsmart them is a fallacy.

Sorry, but popular meme is utter bollocks. Crackers are (mostly) good at cracking software and while I agree that successful cracking is quite a technical task or challenge, and that not many people are capable of that skill there are at least two very obvious problems with what they do.

There are plenty of examples of software available that has never been completely cracked - yes, the software works to a point but it's not 100% cr

More skilled? Hardly. They have a few, well-defined tweaks to make to an existing codebase. That's quite a ways apart from a finished work. Even the best art vandal who draws a genre-appropriate mustache on every bit of art they can get their hands on is hardly displaying skill compared to someone working from scratch.

Why someone would pirate, let alone pay for either of these mentioned games kind deserve far worse...Michael Jackson? Cmon...
Hopefully they'll start putting porn into "pirated" copies of TV series so I can see some cute British guys doing it in between scenes of Merlin, Dr. Who and Skins.

Numerous people had this exact problem with the OP's example or RA2. My brother got hit with it. We owned the game legit, but what triggered the "everything explodes after 30 seconds" behavior is that the installer *did not* tell you if you mistyped the serial number. This was incredibly easy to do since it had an incredibly long serial number.

Surely if it did some cool undocumented thing in the pirated copy you would be impressed enough to pay for the full version - kind of like a "tip" for a job well done.

I dont think they should put annoying stuff in the pirated copies, but if it subtely made winning impossible, yet by the end of the game it becomes obvious, then I think credit where credit is due - the developers are really trying to win you over. and a job well done should be rewarded.

Much better than the stupid "check the internet every time you load the game" piracy prevention techniques. Either its a pirate copy or it isn't. There's no point going after all illegal downloads etc. - just the ones where people were too lazy to go to the shop and pay. Getting the target market right in the first place is half the battle.

but if it subtely made winning impossible, yet by the end of the game it becomes obvious, then I think credit where credit is due - the developers are really trying to win you over.

But then how do you distinguish this from a game that's genuinely difficult, like Tetris The Grand Master 3 [youtube.com] that gets ungodly fast starting around 3:00, and then turns off the lights around 5:00 and you have to beat the game by sense of feel?

But then how do you distinguish this from a game that's genuinely difficult, like Tetris The Grand Master 3 [youtube.com] that gets ungodly fast starting around 3:00, and then turns off the lights around 5:00 and you have to beat the game by sense of feel?

The old school RPG EarthBound for the SNES had a similar, albeit HORRIFYING copy protection mechanic.

If the anti-piracy measures flagged, it would jack up the encounter rate twentyfold--the game would literally be swarming with monsters.

Worst part: if you make it all the way through to the final boss, after his first form the game will lock--the only way out is to reset it, only to find that every single one of your save files have been erased. Starmen.net has an entire page dedicated to this at http://starmen.net/mother2/gameinfo/antipiracy/ .

Generally will fix whatever anti-piracy gimmicks they impliment. The same thing was done to Chrono Trigger on the DS where when you made it to the first time warp it would repeat that scene infinitely. As soon as somebody found out the trigger for what makes it repeat that they released the cheat codes to put onto your cart and you could play the game just fine.

I found one of these when I was a teenager. Freaking subtle. Brilliant.

Steve Jackson's OGRE, for the Commodore 64.

I bought it. And did what any good geek would do. Made a backup and played that. And I could never beat it. But I did eventually screw up that disc - the old 5 1/4 discs did mess up fairly often. Especially in the 1541 drive.

So I played the original. And beat it. Made another backup. Couldn't beat it. A light went off.

I did a statistical analysis. All I did was fire at treads for several games. They're supposed to be hit 33% of the time regardless of weapon or circumstance. On the backup copy, it was close to 17%. On the original copy about 33%.

They built a single column shift into the game if it detects its a copy.

EVIL.

Especially seeing as how - wait for it - I was a paying customer. Thanks guys.

On the plus side, I did get really good at that game. You had to be playing at a column shift disadvantage.

I had not heard that story, but it could be true. Origin was under no obligation to discuss copy protection stunts with me, so "I didn't know"/= "It didn't happen." Still, if this is the first I've heard of it in 20-odd years, it held up pretty well.

A column shift on the whole CRT would have been trivially easy to detect, as attacks that should hit 1/6 of the time will now hit exactly never. A good player will wind up making some of those 1/6 chance (1 to 2) shots every game, unproductive though they are, just to use up odd bits of firepower. So perhaps, if this is really going on, it is a shift only on tread attacks, or only on attacks with odds of 1 to 1 or better?

Steve! So good to hear from you! Been a fan for a long time now. Was just throwing some Illuminati around my table last weekend. The expansion with the artifacts positively rocks. Oh, and we've already got rules for the Zombie Dice drinking game. We have not found players suicidal enough to try it though. Yet.

Anyways, as to the business at hand, I have no idea as to the rest of the chart. I tested treads only, and this was some 20 odd years ago. It's a fuzzy memory at this point. I do recall playing 3-4 games only firing at treads. Initially the idea was "I'm going to stop this damned thing no matter what." Then I added an illegal number of units. And still couldn't stop a Mark 3. That's when the light bulb kind of went off.

Played 3 or 4 games (not a great sampling I know) firing only at treads. Counted them up on a piece of grid paper. Number of times fired, number of hits. And came up to about half what you'd expect. That's when I knew the thing was cheating.

I'll tell you what though. I do have a project in the works. A disassembly of the original C64 Ogre. It's something I've always wanted to do. The copy protection was obvious - a bad sector read early in the boot. It was obvious. The "gronking" noise a 1541 disk drive makes when it hits something it dislikes is well known. My theory is that if it didn't find the magic bad sector - wham! Bad combat tables. A disassembly would prove this out.

Perhaps someday I'll do this. It would be wonderfully old school.

BTW the book included with Ogre where the programmers explain how they programmed the AI is one of the finest programming documents in the universe. It should be a must read for game designers. It really is brilliant. I still have mine, in my original box set. Only thing missing is the radiation badge.

I have played a pirated copy of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 for years.

I can vouch for TFA's claim.

I played RA2 quite the last year or two of high school with some friends in one of the computer labs. We ran into a problem though because the C: of the machines was re-imaged each night (via Deep Freeze). Ironically, the school wouldn't buy a full copy of Deep Freeze and relied on the trial version, which only let you Freeze one partition, and limited the size of that partition. Since the computers had extra room (as the D:\) we installed the game on there.

Often enough that I stopped buying games with copy protection. I may try again with the new Civilization, though. I hear it can be played through wine, and that's an attraction. But I haven't yet researched how well it works, or whether it can be installed. And whether it's picky about just which versions of the OS it uses. (I'm still playing Alpha Centuari, but these days I need to play it in an emulator. It's not compatible with a modern Linux.)

A few months back I had a dodgy internet connection that would only work occasionally and even when it did the signal strength was pitiful (computer on 2nd floor, router on ground). I played Left 4 Dead 2 quite a bit while offline.

The problem for me was when my computer got a connection for long enough to start downloading an update but not long enough finish downloading. I was then unable to play left 4 Dead until the download had completed